Hi everyone, it's been a two week break in this game (although I share other games with most of you, and still see you and play on in them). This is for two reasons, and one will affect the other:
1. Work during this pandemic has been way busier. I teach college, and they haven't closed schools in my country, so we're teaching extra classes and essentially holding the fort by keeping schools open so that we don't have to shut down the workplaces (necessary - if kids stay home, then adults need to as well, as we're trying to avoid a lockdown). So I have less time on my hands, but am still playing and GMing for hours on GP, because well, I'm an RPGer at heart.
2. SR6 takes a lot of time to run properly. While I'm no stranger to rules-heavy crunchy systems, and while my entire story and NPCs have been outlined and DM notes all in place, I still find myself cross-checking back and forth across the rulebook to make sure nothing contradicts. And in many places it does, or is unclear, or just plain incomplete. And I find I have to do this a lot. This is a major time-sink. As a DM, I can make it up or house rule it if I want to, but that's messy and creates problems for players expecting rules to run a certain way, and then having to redo actions just because we've had to change things.
We've run this game for three months, and one of my initial objectives was to playtest this new edition. I've reviewed all our posts thus far, and in truth we've spent as much time discussing and clarifying the rules as we have playing the game (not that I didn't enjoy the discussions). I am inclined to conclude as a DM that this system will continue to be as tedious to run and will require a major investment (on average, posts here take me three to four times as long to prepare as, say, the D&D5e game I'm currently running).
Based on what I still want to do on GP (which includes playing new games and running at least one or two more games), I have two proposals:
The first is to retire the game. I feel as if I've given SR6 a fair run, and do not intend to continue with this system.
The second is to porting the entire story over to a new game system. This will mean learning a new game system for some of you, and starting the character creation process from scratch. If we do this, please suggest what system might work (my preliminary thoughts on this find no compatible cyberpunk system that also does magic though).
Let me know your thoughts on this. I'll wait to make sure I hear from everyone. If it helps, I can create your next posts, just so you know where we're at in terms of story and where we'll pick up from if we restart.
