I was thinking the same thing. A radical change in how things work risks alienating their current fans with no indication that new fans will replace them or surpass their numbers. i.e. It's a tough spot to be in. I'm a fan of the idea that they should work to streamline the rules while retaining as much of the Shadowrun feel as possible. I played a little bit of Shadowrun in the late 80s and early 90s, but it wasn't one I played very frequently. I get a flood of warm nostalgia anytime I see art from the 1st edition book.
And that's fair.
I've just seen versions of this argument before, particularly regarding the Hero System. I've watched people come in and say "The game wouldn't be slowly dying if you'd streamline it." But when pressed on how that's supposed to work, it never addresses the fact that by the time you streamline it enough (which is inevitably going to involve simplification) you're now trying to fish in pools that others have had staked out for potentially a decade or more now (for example, are you, essentially, trying to get the people who are Savage Worlds fans? Mutants and Masterminds fans? What makes you think you're going to peel many of them off?) But since you're inevitably going to lose things along the way (and if you claim otherwise I'm going to pretty much laugh at you) you'll lose some people who've stuck with it, and might even be attracted now even if its not a design that lands toward the general preference swing in this period.
So given all that, a redesign makes sense because--?
There's a lot to like about Shadowrun. While I've alway preferred Cyberpunk, I'll have to admit the setting for SR has always been pretty good and over the years has changed with the times much better than CP. I've always liked character generation and the way you prioritize what's important to you. Do you want to be a Troll? Do you want your lifestyle to be your lowest prority? How about Skills or Attributes? You have a lot of flexibility.
The complication is, of course, as you reference here, that unlike the Hero System which is pretty much all about the system for most people (though there's a lot of setting trailing through it to some extent at the Champions end of it), SR isn't only about the mechanics, but the setting, too. But I think people who think its
only about the setting are projecting a bit.
I picked up 5th edition a few years back and after reading the rules came to the conclusion that running this game didn't interest me. It's been a while, but I just felt the rules for magic, riggers, etc., etc. were all overly complicated when taken in the aggregate. Figuring out a mage wasn't too complicated, but when adding everything else it just seemed like a bigger headache than I wanted.
Its a defensible point. But then, that's been true since 1e (which is the last version I've run extensively, though I've owned every edition but 3e, Anarchy and 6e). I personally think from my one session of it that 5e was at least
as manageable as 1e, and had less problems, but depending on where you come from, that can seem damning with faint praise.
There was one thing that threw me and it was wireless devices. Like, I get how useful wireless devices where, but, for reasons I did't understand, a decker could hack into your cyberware because it was also online. If I were a cybered up Street Samurai, why on God's green Earth would I leave myself vulnerable to hacking by leaving my cyberware connected to the WIFI? Obviously it was to give the decker a chance to defend the group as well as participate in attacks on enemies as he hacks their cyberware, but it just struck me as monumentally stupid. I can accept magic returning and goblinization, but I sure as hell couldn't accept professional killers keeping their cyberlimbs connected to the WIFI.
Well, it is clearly a design decision for the reason you say, but its not like if someone seriously wanted to avoid the risk they couldn't choose non-connected devices. But the tradeoff is that even in SR, as a sammy you can spend a lot of time fighting people that don't have a decker, so do you want that extra edge with the risk that when you
do fight a group with a decker or a technomancer you're more vulnerable? Its not actually a clear-cut decision from the position of sammy's as a whole.