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So far, our group has consisted of: A Drone rigger A PhysAd (myself) A Technomancer A Mercenary/samurai type
The 4 of us (and our GM) have been experimenting with the rules, learning them and using them as best we can as we go.
Character Creation-
This is more difficult than in previous editions. As other reviews have pointed out, if at first you misread the rules and spend your points wrongly, you do have to go back and virtually remake the character. Although our group did download a program that assists you with this process, it has some limits and innacuracies, so you ultimately must use the book somehow.
The inclusion of Dodge and Perception as skills forces players to spend precious points, just to navigate the world decently.
Limits on availability mean that despite the afforable nature of wired reflexes three, only adepts or magicians with the right spell can start with 4 initiative passes.
Adepts are fine, overall. If you want more dice through, don't look to exceed your stat. Just buy more dice with extra skill points. Costs to exeed your max stat are prohibitively expensive, unless you like the attribute boost power (which is like a temporary surge, with drain). Otherwise, the new Killing Hands rework and Critical Strike, make unarmed the route of choice. And you'll still have plenty leftover for reflexes, unlike in 3E and lower.
Skill groups are best where magicians are concerned. With conjuring now needlessly broken up into 4 (count em) skills, groups are the best bet here.
Worst Points: Knowledge skills. Free points are given based on attributes, but the rules say Skill Points, the sample characters say Build Points. Technomancers must buy powers at point/point cost, rather than using exact duplicate of magic rules (which limits spell rating by special attribute), limiting their powers, compared to a hacker. TMs start at lowest power levels. Clarity of rules for character creation is less than ideal. Material is spread around. Too many skills required for Hacking.
Best Points: As a compulsive character maker, I found that once you caught on to their system, it was relatively easy to make the characters. The simplification was a welcome thing in some areas. Skill Groups vs Seperate Skills was a stroke of genius.
Playability:
I've had a custom dwarf samurai unload with both barrels on a generic street sam from the book, and do minimal damage. The next round he was hit by the samurai's weapon and lost all his damage boxes. The round after that, the shaman with compat paralysis killed him with a well placed mana bolt, so I suppose it balances out, but daaamn. one round. Armor and Dodge skill were used also.
We get a lot of use from the matrix in our games, and the drones being the added artillery we need is very nice. We haven't used much of the combat system, partly due to it's clunkiness. It takes a lot of dice rolling to get through a round, and unless the GM is keeping things on serious task, you can begin to see the players who are not acting begin to futz with other things while dice are calculated. The hard/fast rules are recommended here, so that combat remains streamlined. The dice resolve quickly enough, but if you had a rules lawyer in the group arguing all the applicable modifiers, your game would be dead after round two. Dicemongers may also begin to get the fits here too, because there are typically not enough dice to succeeed well at anything until you get to melee combat and get too many dice to fit in one hand (Dodge+Agility, then Armor+Body). If you like a lot of dice, either be a physad with unarmed, or armed plus a weapon focus (combat axe still the best choice). No rules for Daikote yet, sorry. "Super Initiative" characters will very often go first, but are a bit more mortal than last editions, it seems to me.
The wireless matrix idea is probably the best piece to come out of the whole product and is endlessly inspiring to me personally. All my characters own commlinks with a few common use programs.
Spirits work very nicely as they can be summoned on demand by all traditions now, and bound if they must be kept longer.
Karma spends nicely, overall, but then again, our group is getting 5-10 pts per session average. So, in the few sessions we've had I've already been able to initiate the PhysAd once, and with his next bump only a couple sessions away, he'll be getting L3 flexes in short order.
The whole Public Awareness/Notoriety/Total Karma System is long overdue, and very cool. Gives you a real sense of where your character 'ranks' in the shadows.
The lowered cost of items makes them easier to obtain, and money is no longer an issue for starting characters. Availability has been streamlined, but may be a bit too streamlined for it's own good.
OVERALL:
Rules are nice, but more detail is needed, and better organization of those rules would be very helpful. Some rules work well, others are time consuming where they wouldn't seem to need to be. The monotone color scheme of the book added to the sometimes helter-skelter content locations left me feeling like the product was rushed to market. I look forward to the inevitable updates, and would say we are quite thirsty fort them, so we can add some depth and customization to the characters the main book doesn't allow for. I hope it gets better with time.
