What's RIGHT with Shadowrun 5th Edition?

"They'll negotiate, they're corporate."

"So's the Yakuza."


Probably everyone knows I recently picked up on Shadowrun 5th Edition. Fourth edition was mostly skipped over by my group for a few regrettable reasons. For one, it wasn't unilaterally better, and changed several base mechanics. It was a new team, so I sort of forgive them the attempt. The second and more egregious is that it didn't really feel like cyberpunk as we knew it. With technology marching forward it started to feel a lot less like Johnny Mnemonic and a lot more like Ghost in the Shell. Different strokes for different folks, and 4e just wasn't my kind of stroke.

Anyway. Fifth Edition was obviously developed by a huge team of third edition grognards, so it feels a lot closer. You can tell they have a lot(maybe too much) of love for 3e by little hints in the book(Turn to Goo has returned) as well as the hilariously out of place homage to Blackjack in the critter section. If you're lost on that, he was an insightful Shadowrun blogger back in the ancient days of the Internet.  I'm not going to do a whole post reviewing Fifth, so please consider what I'm about to say my full thoughts on it. If you'd like, skip the bit between the roses if you want to just get to the point of today's post.

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Fifth edition's not bad, and it's far more "pick-up-able" than 3e is. It's easier to understand and I like the idea of a static target number better. Skill checks being your stat plus your skill means stats are more valuable. It's less dense, which some people may enjoy and others might not. The equipment and cyberware sections are very insightful, with this edition giving rules for things that I've either always wanted or never knew was missing. Things like portable circular saws or mini-welders are the sort of B&E gear the game needs, and the cosmetic cyberware including treatments to specifically make orks and trolls more "presentable" to humans made me wonder why that was missing previously. Dice pools are gone and replaced by a standard defense check, meaning playing the "fast guy" is a viable and fun way to play instead of just being a glass cannon.

Now, for the bad. They introduced "limits" to avoid people leveraging a huge number of dice on tests, which is a non-problem many people enjoy complaining about in third edition. People who haven't ever played Shadowrun frequently bring up "all dem dice" as a reason the game is bad. Basically, in 5e there's almost always something restricting the maximum amount of successes you can apply to a test, usually defined by a derived stat or something set by your gear. The issue is that limits range from a non-issue when it's your specialty to severely damaging when it isn't. It mostly only serves to lock people into their specializations by making it harder to branch out, heightening a minor issue 3e had. It also invalidates a lot of gear and makes melee weapons a problem due to relatively low limits in their "accuracy" rating, which can't be brought up with accessories like gun accuracy can. Out of I'd say 20 melee weapons across the books, maybe 5 of them are viable choices. In addition, their armor rules are as follows: Wearing armor gives you anything from 8 to 17 more dice for resisting  damage. This means someone like an ork wearing 5e's equivalent to security armor can easily be rolling 25 to 30 dice for damage resistance. With no limit. Good job, you fucking hypocrites.

Spirits are even more overpowered. Vehicles and riggers are straight fucked up. There's an extreme lack of customization(the fun part of vehicles in 3e) and vehicles are much less survivable, to the point that a guy with a Predator V can probably beat the best book standard drone in one or two shots.  This is partially the fault of the game's damage system, but also because there's no "specialness" to vehicle's armor and body beyond it not taking stun damage. The 'wireless' layer of gear complexity is part of the story, sure, but it's unwelcome, dumb, and a weak way to give deckers "something to do" in combat. Finally, there's a lot of space in some certain books dedicated to pointless mechanics like extra ways to call a shot that could have gone to reprinting 3e's best features: the spell, firearm or vehicle creation rules.

Overall, it's two different games. It pains me to say that, but it's the truth. It's not going to replace 3e for anyone, but I knew that going in and still had fun.

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So finally I tell you why we're talking about 5e at all. Remember some of the problems we talked about with 3e? Well, Fifth Edition makes a concerted effort to fix them, and today I want to cherry pick some and talk about some simple 3e house rules. Do I think 3e desperately needs a rebalancing? Nah. Do I think it might be super interesting to play around with it? Absolutely. Don't worry about the workings of 5e, because I'll be hand-adapting when necessary to avoid having to explain huge swaths of 5e's rules.

Street Index. This is the simplest one. 5e doesn't HAVE Street Index, in an effort to simplify and streamline. Considering Street Index really only serves to fuck over people trying to upgrade or replace cyberware, I could see removing it entirely. There may be some items that need their price adjusted to compensate, but I didn't see any when I researched in preparation for this post. 3E's book even claims this is a cost that players will be paying(and I quote) "99.99% of the time" so I'm not really sure why they even bothered.

Cyberware Grade Cost Adjustments. The thing about 5e is that it reduces the range of money overall. Most cyberware costs far less, but you also get less money for Resources. "The Million" in 5e is "the 450k". Which sounds way less exciting, but overall this means upgrading cyberware hurts less. Adapting that would be far too much work, but what we can do is take a page from their adjustments to cyberware grades. The essence reduction remains the same, but the cost is far lower, as follows.

Alpha: x 1.2
Beta: x 1.5
Delta: x 2.5

We can't quite go that far down without altering what things cost. That'd be pretty nuts. What I recommend is something like this:

Alpha: x 2
Beta: x 3
Delta: x 4

Essence cost, availability adjustment, and the rigamarole you have to go through to find a Delta clinic are unchanged. This way, buying something that's delta in this house rule is the same as buying beta in the core system. It also means starting characters are untouched, which is very important. It's still rough, but I'm not comfortable bringing it down any further.  Removing Street Index would help a little too. If you think this is insane as it is, please remember that the cybernetic character still has to pay doctor's fees and the cost of the new ware he's installing in that little essence hole he's making. That always was the fucker of cyberware upgrading: Even after all that money blown, you still had to buy the next piece of ware.

Initiation Costs. In 3e, the base multiplier for the karma cost of initiation is 3. An Ordeal reduces this by 0.5, and a group reduces this by 1, for a total reduction of 1.5, or 50%. In 5e, these both reduce the cost by 10%, and an additional option of spending 10k nuyen for schooling reduces it by an additional 10%. This would mean that instead of two options providing a 50% total reduction, three options would provide a 30% total reduction. This also makes getting a group together less important. This is another place where I'm not sure I'm going far enough, but I'm making a deliberate attempt to avoid rocking the boat.

Karma Pool. 5e doesn't have karma pool. It's got a stat called Edge, which you buy up like any other stat like Body or Strength. It does the same thing as karma pool, but you choose when to raise it. Humans get a bonus point of edge to begin with. You can just straight up adapt that if you really want, since stat karma costs are identical in both systems. However, a compromise version is that, instead of metahumans getting half the karma pool that humans get, humans get one additional karma pool and everyone gets an additional one every ten karma. It'd mean a ton early on(which I can't really help) but much less later. 50% less karma pool is just pretty freaking harsh, especially on elves who are getting far less mileage out of that +1 Agility in 3e as compared to 5e.


Unfortunately, I can't tell you I have a fix for vehicles being so tough, since that's one area where 5e drops the ball pretty significantly. In addition to that, their fix for deckers is...well, it's suspect. Being able to manipulate wireless capabilities may be neat for some people, but it's also very ingrained in the way 5e is: It's a wireless explosion, with the whole world being covered in a virtual reality shell, assuming you buy the glasses or contacts to see it. It's an intrinsic part of 5e's story, and can't just be adapted down to 3e, which is dealing with decidedly different themes than 5e is.