I'm wondering what everyone thinks about the idea of limiting starting character's skills and natural attributes?  An attribute/skill of 4 in SR4 is equal to a skill of 6 in SR3.  We wouldn't even think about allowing a skill past 6 in SR3 (Well, except specializations). 

So, here's my proposal.  All skills and attributes are capped at 4 out of chargen (Natural attributes, not augmented attributes).  The only exception would be resonance for technomancers, and magic for adepts and mystic adepts.  Of course, mystic adepts wouldn't be allowed to take more than 4 magic towards magical skills (Sorcery/Conjuring).  Naturally, this would be modified for race, so starting elves could leave chargen with a charisma of 6 if they wanted.

The idea is to create starting characters with toned down attributes and skills that allow players to be good without creating characters who have no place to go.  Thus, you wouldn't get that 7(10) agility + 6 pistol gunbunny with no real way to improve.  (Who, coincidentally, equates out to a character with 11(15!!!) quickness elf with pistol 9 in SR 3.)

So, let the flames begin!!!

*runs for bomb shelter...*

I  think the karma cap is more than enough of a limiting factor.

You are already capped at a max of one 6 or two 5's for skills.  That seems reasonable, and there is no reason to change it.  And you are capped at 200 BP for attributes, which is easily strict enough to prevent you from having uber stats.  If you spend all your BP to cap out one attribute and skill, more power to you, because you're an idiot.  I say let people be idiots who waste all their BP maxing out a single attribute or skill.  They're only gimping their entire +sheet to be able to do one thing.  I wouldn't call that something that needs a houserule fix.

I'm sorry, but I can't think of a single redeeming quality in your argument.  It is a pointless rule grounded on animosity towards powerful characters and misguided notions about having 'someplace to go.'  For the record, a character who starts with a maxed attribute/skill has LOTS of places to go because they are horribly overspecialized.  That's built into the system.  Either you're relatively versatile and can work on improving your moderately good skills and stats into really good skills and stats, or you're specialized and can work on pumping up the things you neglected in chargen.  Your idea is based on a shallow look at the system which has little to do with the reality of the game.  No offense 

Yeah, skilled specialists have entire worlds of options; they just need to concentrate on attribute synergy in order for their new skills to develop quickly (IE, gunslingers should work towards becoming B&E artists, high logic characters can become expert medics). Never underestimate how much SkillWires can ease the transition into a new role as well. Early in my group's SR4 career, one of my friends converted his super specialized Samurai into being to a fairly useful Combat Hacker much quicker than we had expected. He simply invested in the Electronics group and shared high quality programs with our dedicated Hacker. His Wired Reflexes, beefy Agent and the Electronic Warfare and Cybercombat ActiveSofts made him great cannon fodder (using AR for no physical risk of course ) against anyone who invaded the team PAN.

And it's really, really hard to make a generalist with nowhere to go. My most (in?)famous character in my IRL group was an Ork Face/Hacker/Athlete/Swiss Army Knife with muscle toners, cereberal boosters, Synthacardium, SkillWires, Wired Reflexes  and 5 Edge but who also only 90 bps spent on his base attributes. He never really got much higher than 12 dice in any one given skill, but he could throw 10-11 dice in many different areas once he boosted his unaugmented attributes up to 2s and started purchasing specializations for his skills. If nothing else, he could really rock those teamwork tests.

I agree wholeheartedly with Tear.

I want to add though, about the comparison to characters in SR3.  A character with 15 dice towards pistols gets an average of 5 successes in SR4.  A character with 6 dice in SR3 got an average of 5 successes on shooting the enemy too.  You could very easily in SR3 get to a TN of 2 without even trying to the point of ludicrousness.  This sort of comparison is easily broken with our common experience in SR3 and how one of the first things most people said upon reading SR4 was...  "Wow, look at how weak they make everyone."  Or something similar.

Methinks Tear will make a uber lawyer.  Whats your retainer?

Tear's argument is win. I agree.

Edit: Also, NO HOUSERULES IN BETA!!!

Actually, my view isn't as 'shallow' as you might think, Tear.  Nor am I on an anti-powerful character crusade.  The idea isn't to get rid of powerful characters.    The idea is to reduce the starting level so the powerful character is the result of the hard work and effort of the player.  A sort of reward earned for putting the effort into the character. 

By the way, I do think that it's foolish to max out your attributes in chargen.  Attributes have a low enough karma cost that it's not worth it.  What I find disappointing is that no one spotted the real flaw in limiting attributes to four.  200 points divided into 10 points per attribute point is 20 attribute raises.  20 divided by the 8 attributes is 2.5 attribute points per.  Which allows the creating a character that is half fours and half threes (4 being the highest value you could get, remember?).  Thus, making characters less distinct from one another.  (It seems so obvious now, doesn't it?)

Skills, on the other hand, are far better raised in chargen than attributes, for several reasons. If you're going to max out a skill, you're better off doing it in chargen than doing it post chargen.  (Probably a huge part of the reason why you're only allowed to get 2 (or 3 for that '7') points above 4 in chargen.)

I just think that it's sad that the difference between a new char and a veteran char in their defining skill is that the veteran char has more money/magic/resonance.

Oh, and NES.  I remember firing guns in SR3, too.  Of course, my GMs were probably a lot more strict than yours were, because I remember a lot more TN 8's.  (Base TN 4 + 1 for medium range - 1 for image enhancement + 1 for partial light (low light) + 4 for target has cover - 2 smartlink:  TN 7) 

I also remember light pistols sucking, wearing enough layered armor (And helmets, forarmed guards, and the great ffba3!) to reduce normal bullets down to TN 2, having enough body to thus soak that 2D damage (and not having enough to soak all of 2D+1 damage), and using either APDS or AV rounds all the time.

Combat's deadlier in SR4 by far.

Ok, now, back to staring at pretty lights.... (oooooooo...)

Ok...  So you don't hate powerful chars, you fully understand that characters are pretty well limited in chargen...  Your proposed rule is just based on your feelings.  The system lets you create new characters who are experts at something.  There is no possible reason why this should be eliminated, other than your dislike for it (which is not a valid reason). 

Combat deadlier in SR4? When pigs fly. SR4 combat is you adding up your dice, the GM taking them away, then you roll edge.

Edge is really not that much of a game changing dynamic...  It's the same as karma pool, only you can start out with it, it has a hard cap, and it only ever gives you one reroll.  It does the same thing that much of SR4 does, it narrows the gap between starting and veteran characters.

As for whether combat is deadlier, I think that it really isn't.  Obviously taking cover makes a big difference, but usually SR3 combat was just twich-happy - before anyone even gets to cover, the sammy caps them in the head with TN2.  The TN system and combat pool system let even pistols become incredibly deadly, since you'd need so many successes to stage down that you couldn't win - even if your damage resistance test was against TN2.  SR4 subtly alters this - on the initial attack, the score is fairly even.  The attacker rolls skill + attribute, and the defender rolls skill + attribute (on full defense).  But once you're hit, you're in trouble - you need an average 3 dice per DV of an attack to take no damage from it.  This means that even a weak DV4 attack requires 12 dice on average to fully resist, something only fairly tough characters will have.  And if you get hit with a strong attack, say DV9, you need 27 dice...  Only a tank troll would have that much.  In SR3 it wasn't hard to get high body and high armor and add combat pool so that you could shrug off most attacks.  But in SR4, if you don't dodge you are probably getting hurt.

Not everyone has a high Edge score and those players with low to average totals are often best served by saving their Edge points to stave off disasters via downgrading glitches and rerolling complete failures rather than going for one shot kills. As Tear pointed out, harming people in SR4 is relatively easy while soaking damage once inflicted is a real bitch, so it can really pay to budget Edge for defense accordingly, even for characters with 5+ Edge. Besides, the whole "best defense is a good offense" rule goes right out the window the second you're facing more opponents than you can reliably grease in a pass or two. I guess I'm just saying that Edge can be used to make combat safer OR deadlier, but in my group at least it isn't used for the latter as often as the former.

Here's the problem with the thought that SR3 wasn't 90% of the time against TN2s.  I played many years of SR3 on MUXs, I'm talking about MUX experience because in Table Top Games I was as mean of a GM as I am in building twink characters.  I underpowered all my NPCs so I wouldn't accidentally kill my PCs.  And the tactics they used would inspire my PCs to do strange and wacky things just to survive.  Because of that, I think I honed a few player's into being better at making characters.

Enough about my experience though and let's get down to builds.  First, partial lighting should never ever ever make a samurai have any modifiers at all.  You take low-light and eyelights and within pistol ranges and most other combat ranges (100 meters) you have no modifiers except in total darkness with a piss-ant +2 TN.  Smartlink gets you -2 TN. Custom grips on pistols meant you had no TN modifier for shooting it twice.  Then you have either EXEX ammo or APDS/AV ammo.

Now, before you account for Cover and movement modifiers your Samurai build will either go first, because you junked up your reaction enhancers and have all that cyber for super high int+quickness, meaning you not only saw the enemy before you got to them but than you ALSO get to go before them.  Second build, you are an Adept with that power that lets you decide to go first.  If you are not either of those two things, you would DIE in SR3 against any moderately equipped group of people.

If you had some uber awesome plan that utilized some tactic that not even the dumbest security group couldn't figure out, then maybe you could win otherwise.  Like hunting them down two at a time with an uber melee+stealth physical adept.  However, even in that situation any Samurai PC would see that person coming, and any challenging powerlevel-wise samurai would too.  Security on the other hand prolly wouldn't.  So its a viable build for most Shadowruns.  Again, that person isn't TN2, but they ARE tn4 all the time, with no resistance checks against them cause they are surprising everyone they meet.

Next.  When you got shot by pistols and you had 8 body (a good amount in SR3) you usually had to use some combat pool to soak the damage.  Now, if it was again, against dumb security with no skill and a GM who wasn't willing to use the KP of their NPCs against players, then yeah... you'd have enough always.  But, otherwise, you are fending off about 12 dice worth of damage if you get hit.  You shouldn't, cause up to 2 people could be dead with one pistol, with MUX rules of ambidexterity 4 people would be dead, or with fully suppressed SMGs that could each fire full-auto with no mods you could kill upwards of 5 people pretty easily with one or two re-rolls.

In all of my experiences with any of my combat characters when it came to rolling dice, I won.  It was before the dice were ever rolled that combat challenges actually took place.  Whether or not we HAVE a way to catch X person by surprise, or without making noise, etc.  But, when the dice were thrown for combat, the NPCs died.  Every single time.  It was so easy to make an uber powerful SR3 character with virtually any weapon Heavy Pistol or higher that it wasn't even funny.

SR4, gives you dodge, which is super cinematic.  It also gives you lower powered weapons, but it makes those weapons harder to soak.  So, even from a basic light pistol, 4 DV, you will likely take at least 1 damage if you don't dodge it successfully.  And dodging can get pretty tough the more people assaulting you, or just from a bad roll.  Soaking is no longer an option against the small weapons for eternity anyways, and the big weapons make more sense as to WHY they are so deadly.  A machinegun can ACTUALLY do cover fire now, because its dangerous even if a stray bullet hits you.  You WILL take damage, unless you are playing my possession tank.

SR3 was all about twinking, and it was easy to do.  It was so easy that I rarely ran into a non-twink and the people who weren't twinks usually had some ethical opposition to making good and effective characters.  I had a character who could move roughly 80 kmph, wield any full-auto weapon, and resist damage from just about everything (except a franchi-spas 22 which was the deadliest man-portable weapon in SR3 you'd realistically run into), and I'd shoot at Tn2s all the time.  In full darkness I was only at Tn4.  With KP after a few months of playing you could re-roll upwards of 3 times on the SAME ROLL, so you just kill all the dangerous people after you go first, and soak the weak fire.  MORE DEADLY, meant more defended.

SR4 now is all about separating those fields.  You have your defensive characters and your offensive characters.  And the hybrids.  Averaging out everything to middle of the road isn't good.  Someone SHOULD have 17 dice in pistols if they want, cause I can make my character have like 20 dice in dodge even if we cap it at 4s for basic attributes. If they were stuck with only 10 dice (4attr+4skill+2 smartlink) I'd be a happy camper.  Never get shot.

As an aside.  Any game with smart people controlling it is perfectly challenging to the players no matter their power level.  So why limit them?  Limits only make a person feel like they don't get to play what they want to play and thus feel less like playing the game.  We don't want that, we want people to play what's available in the Books to its full extent.  It lowers time people have to get accustomed to the game AND makes them feel like its more free than other places with arbitrary, and often, ignorantly designed Houserules.  Just get better GMs.

Houserules = NO.

Only when things are broken.  IMHO nothing is broken with CG.  I prefer the 400 BP system with all standing rules as published.