[CodexArcanum]

Can I point out the glaringly obvious fact that "survivability" and such are rather abstract qualities anyway that depend largely on the group and the GM. A half-hour character in a group full of militant power-gamers who spent a week tweaking their characters out is going to be a little underpowered, yes. A quick character with some average skills and some high skills is going to do fine in a group of like minded players, though.

Hell, even the power group isn't going to survive an ambush of a dozen Tir Ghosts with machine guns and grenade launchers. The book kind of implies that a starting group should be fighting gang-bangers and street-thugs. You'd have to try to make a crappy character to not be able beat some guys with baseball bats.

This all applies doubly so to stuff like contacts and stealth. Stealth won't do you any good if the GM sets up a decent surveilance set up. Actually, a good GM would set up areas for the stealthy characters to sneak through while the street sammy holds off opposition and gets ready to break through the door that the stealthy guys are unlocking.

As to social skills and contacts, it's not like contacts are the only people that a person ever talks to. The GM is going to have NPCs to deal with, likely NPCs that will become future contacts. And that's not even to mention all the other PCs' contacts.

The hacking/computer/matrix stuff is all a little screwed up. But it's not like a newbie computer user can't get a security specialist to install some protection on his machine. I'm not government hacker, but I can walk my grandma through installing a firewall and an antivirus on her PC. Surely the commlink vendor can setup a decently intelligent fellow with some IC and a good firewall. Not that it matters all that much.

If he's got no computer skill, then he's supposed to get hacked. That's like saying that guys with no combat skills will get their lights punched out in a fight: duh! And besides all of that, no street sammy is going to keep anything important on their commlink. The most important things--their cyberware, smartlinked handguns, and cyber-enhanced eyes--won't even be linked to the matrix anyway. Or, worse case scenario, someone does hack in and he has to turn his commlink off and reboot to kick the guy out. Ouch, he just lost a whole action phase. He'll just have to hold off on shooting the guy until his next action.

Finally, finally, as to the matter of SR "stealing" WW's system. Number one, you can't steal dice mechanics. And a Stat+Skill dicepool is about as obvious as you get. Secondly, I was under the impression that the first edition of the storyteller system was based on SR's dicepool mechanics. If that's the case, then it's just come full circle around. Thirdly, I wish more RPGs would use what worked from each other. There'd be less shit on the shelves and more decent games to play. Fourthly, the two systems are only similar at the basest level. The differences are numerous enough that trying to claim ripoff is like saying that Unisystem stole from D&D because both use a single die roll to resolve conflict.


Anyway, I much prefer the point-buy system of SR4 to the complex priority game of SR3. The one thing it needed was some guidelines on about how many points to spend per section (which it somewhat has, actually). Even still, I figured out a good range of points per section to tell my players after making just one character. And that first character took me about an hour and a half to make. My friends took about 2 hours to make characters, and a few spent an extra 2 hours because they wanted to fiddle with their options, but they were ready to play after the first 2 hours. That's actually pretty fast considering how long it takes us to get up on some games.