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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 8679641" data-attributes="member: 2209">I played a bunch of older edition Shadowrun (a lot of 1e and 2e, but some 4e too). My experience is that none of us in the groups I was in enjoyed sitting around for long drawn out stretches watching others do things that our characters literally couldn't even see. We came to play as a group, not to sit and watch others play.Decking was an involved system that took a while to resolve.Astral could be a quick scouting ahead to pop back and say what was magically in the immediate area, or a full multi-part quest to scout out a complex, learn magic, summon and bind a spirit, and/or to engage in astral combat. As a cybered up bodyguard I have literally spent an entire session where my character was in a room with the other characters while the mage did astral stuff. No in game action happened for the rest of us, the whole session was resolving the astral stuff.Many character types can be specialized to be fantastic in combat in different ways, cybered up characters, physical adept magically enhanced characters, combat mages, shamans. Even orcs and trolls can generally be combat effective in some ways while specializing in non-combat stuff. A troll politician who specializes their stats on charisma over increasing baseline troll strength can be devastating with an axe and take a hit decently. There are many ways to make a diverse group of competent combatants specialized in different ways in a Shadowrun group.Shadowrun pays off in a lot of ways for specializing though, and so to be a good decker you want to put in a lot of character build resources to max out those abilities including online combat with AIs, which means not a lot left to significantly develop physical world combat stuff. Baseline people without significant physical world oriented combat character build development are really fragile and can be chewed up  in fights quickly and are far inferior to fellow PCs who develop significant combat abilities. Someone who split their character build development between multiple areas (say combat and decking) usually mechanically came out as just a bit above baseline and significantly far behind specialists in both their areas.In a number of ways the system mechanically rewarded having some frail otherwise crippled specialists do their solo thing while others focused on combat and the group activity.In the last campaign I played in we explicitly agreed to have no deckers as PCs and we each made combat competent characters in one way or another.It is good to hear that the newer editions incentivize having the decker with the group and integrated with the actions of the rest of the group instead of remotely in a room solo.</blockquote>

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