"WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?! You know, all my life, I've been careful to stay in my own corner. Lookin' out for Number One, no complications. Now suddenly, I'm responsible for the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD! And everybody and his mother is trying to kill me if, IF! My head doesn't blow up first. "
"Maybe it's not just about you anymore."
"Listen. You Listen. You see that city over there? THAT'S where I'm supposed to be. Not down here with the dogs and the garbage and the fuckin' last month's newspapers flying BACK AND FORTH! I've HAD IT with them! I've HAD IT with you, I've had it with ALL THIS!
I WANT ROOM SERVICE! I want the club sandwich. I want the cold Mexican beer. I WANT A TEN THOUSAND DOLLAR A NIGHT HOOKER. I want my shirts laundered. Like they do at the Imperial Hotel. "
Hi. I'm not dead, I've just spent the last month plagued with Pneumonia. I tried to do some writing, but it just wasn't going to happen. I have been reading a lot about Shadowrun 5th Edition and even playing some of it, though. My research into that game has got me thinking about 3rd a lot and comparing the two, since SR4 was...sort of booted out of existence for being too different from Shadowrun's core feels. More on Cyberpunk as a genre later. SR5's efforts to fix some things got me thinking about where SR3 goes wrong.
So that's what we're talking about today.
I still have plenty of love for SR3. I'm always going to. I think it's a great game that captures the feel of Cyberpunk better than any other game I've ever played, even Cyberpunk 2020. No offense, Grand-dad. However, SR3 is far from perfect. It could even use some house-rules stolen wantonly from SR5 to improve balance between concepts. It's dense and rules-rich, but we're not going to be going into any subjective problems. No mentions of how deadly the system is, no talk about how dense the rules are and how often you end up hand-waving some of them, et cetera. I'm sticking to objective problems. Places the system goes wrong and causes inequality. In fact, inequality is probably its biggest problem.
Samurai vs. Physad. In fact, let's talk about that first. Sammies, or individuals who buy cyberware to increase their effectiveness, fill roughly the same role with physads. Early in publication each concept had a fair amount of strengths over the other, but as publications came out, the strengths of the samurai were chipped away. the supplement State of the Art 2063 added some decent, interesting bioware, but State of the Art 2064 came out soon after and dropped Christmas present after Christmas present on magic types in general, and physads in specific. Suddenly there wasn't anything a physad couldn't be excellent at. Even if you keep the rules-as-written rule of metahumans getting half karma pool(more on that later) this guides the player toward shoring up defenses and strength by playing an ork or troll physad and saving technological character concepts for severe BOD/STR stacking shenanigans or mere style.
Samurai vs. Physad 2: Improvement Costs. Here we go. Here we fucking go! We joke all the time about Physads being a black hole from which no Karma escapes, but really, all of this is the other way around. Physads live on core improvement easy street while technological concepts are blown out an airlock like Jayne should have been. Let's dazzle you with some fucking math.
First off, Page 242 of the core rulebook says a run could be "up to 10 or 12" karma for an especially difficult run. We'll ballpark an average run being 5 karma, but go ahead and look at what the book says if you'd like. I'd wager most runs are going to be between 4 and 6.
Next, page 100 of the Shadowrun Companion suggests base monetary rewards for runs. Assassination, Destruction, and Smuggling runs pay out 5,000 nuyen at base, with few of the options being above that. While some, potentially a lot of runs are going to pay less than that, let's take that as our average.
So, our average run is going to be 5 karma and 5,000 nuyen. Keep that in mind.
Our boy the physad can spend karma on initiation to gain extra power points to spend on powers. He has the option to join a group to reduce the cost, or take an ordeal. Both of these practices are incredibly common. If he's done both, his first initiation will cost 9 karma. Now, an ordeal is not and should never be a "nothing" challenge, even though some are. However, this hardship is balanced out by the fact that they get Metamagics which end up being pretty god damn useful, so we're tossing both concepts out of the conversation. He'll get this in two sessions, but let's say three sessions because he needed to blow a few karma founding or joining a magical group.
The sammie needs to improve the grade of his cyberware, to reduce the cost and gain more out of his six essence. He never gets more than that, so playing a sammie means essence budgeting. For most people, that's the fun of it.
The largest, cheapest piece of ware an average runner is going to have is easily wired reflexes, so let's say he's trying to improve that. Our sammie started the game with Alpha Wired Reflexes 2, which cost him 330k nuyen and takes up 2.4 essence.
He wants to upgrade that to Beta. He has to take the old system out and replace it. The new system will cost 660k nuyen and take up 1.8 essence, so we're currently fishing for an upgrade of 0.6 essence. Used cyberware has a purchase modifier of 0.5, so let's say he can sell his old system for 0.25 the cost, or 82.5k nuyen, leaving him with a total bill of 577.5k nuyen.
our sammie will free up his 0.6 essence in a total of 115.5 sessions. That's a hundred and fifteen and a half sessions. I didn't even factor in the cost of filling that essence with a piece of cyberware. I swear to you, this is the best scenario I could find.
But there's an alternate rule that lets you trade karma for cash. Yes, and the base, book listed version of that rule suggests that one point of karma gives you up to a thousand nuyen. Be still my beating heart, that will surely fix the problem.
But you can simply give more nuyen. This helps, sure. The problem being that the physad is also getting this reward and is spending it on foci or fun things that the sammie is denying himself to try and improve his character.
but-...you know what, we're not talking about fixes just yet.
The Physad did pay build points for his powers. That's very true. However, most people miss the fact that money, too costs build points. The physad can easily build off the five thousand you get for "zero" points in money, and I've seen plenty do just that. That means being a physad cost him 25 points. Most samurai, on the other hand, buy "the million" in nuyen. that's 30 points. Oops.
I also want to address bioware. It's even more expensive than cyberware and has higher street index, and has a separate limit of 3 plus the sammie's remaining essence. This means, no matter how you slice it, a sammie starts with 9 points of "power" as opposed to the physad's 6. It's another fair comparison, but doesn't assuage the above concerns: assuming power points and essence/bio index are roughly the same(they're not, but it's close) the physad will "catch up" in three initiations and surpass in four. That's 32(9+ 11+12) karma to catch up, and another 14 to surpass. The physad is better than the samurai in a mere ten sessions. The samurai, at this point, still has another 105.5 sessions to go before he can upgrade his wired reflexes and free up enough essence for a combat benefit.
Karma Pool and Metahumans. Whew. Now that the big one's out of the way, let's relax and point out a smaller problem. I've mentioned this one before, too. Metahumans receive a point of karma pool every 20 karma earned, whereas humans get one every 10. Karma pool is pretty important, and this is a huge hit. However, being a metahuman brings a lot of stats to the table, and even though my groups abolish this rule, I can see why it exists. I can see why you'd want some sort of mitigating factor to playing an ork, a troll, or even a dwarf because they give strong, universal benefits.
Try as I might, though, I can't think of a reason elves take this penalty too. They get a bonus to agility, which isn't that useful considering a +1 isn't going to net them another point of reaction on their own. They also get a +2 to charisma, which unless you're summoning spirits, does fuckall for your character except minorly reduce the cost of raising charisma linked skills. Big deal.
Deckers. I don't have a huge amount to say on this, and really I'm only including it because it's SR3's classic problem. Both 4e and 5e took a lot of steps to fix this, and not everyone likes what they came up with. While decking during legwork phases flows easily and is simple to manage, as soon as the team infiltrates the facility in question, all hell breaks loose and it becomes a nightmare. That's because not only does he has to split his attention between two places, but one of those places runs at a different time speed than the other. This problem often leads to two things: Either players play "legwork deckers" and take care of their job before the run starts...or more often, playing a decker is seen as a burden or more work than its worth.
Vehicle Damage. This one's pretty contentious. I've gone back and forth myself. Vehicles in Shadowrun 3rd have a blanket protection when they get attacked: 1/2 power code and -1 damage level before you do any calculation. I'm mostly fine on this considering they have low body dice(in general) and, well...it's a vehicle. Not many people are going to get anywhere punching a car, even if it's a Saturn. It's a bigger problem when you consider drones are vehicles, and many drones have an incredible amount of armor on them. This combined with a rigger's control pool means riggers are holy terrors, on the level of a GM having to take care using one as an NPC. The fact that anti-vehicular weapons are all either non-concealable, expensive, non-man-portable, and/or hard to find doesn't help.
--
So that's it for now. I'm sure there are other problems, but I feel I hit the big points. There's even a lot of more subjective ones like Street Index being a terrible concept in execution, and totally not helping the cyberware upgrade issue above. I love Shadowrun, particularly 3rd edition, and I feel it's a fairly well balanced game. Why'd I do this, then? Well...no system is perfect, and I wanted to show that. Really, the fact that I can boil its issues down to one post means it's doing pretty fucking good. Shadowrun has it sort of easy where a lot of its problems can be fixed in simple house rules, and I'll likely be going over some I've been thinking about in the future. It doesn't have any systemic problems like Call of Cthulhu, or any problems caused by a giant, hard-to-tackle mass of issues like Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 or classic World of Darkness.
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