As a whole, SR4 is a pretty solid system.

However, it does have a number of

problems. I myself used much of SR4's system when I wrote aWoD, but I made
several changes. As Cain alludes to, the Matrix system is badly in need of a ground-
up rethink. Shadowrun's Matrix rules have been written and rewritten more than 10
times - with each major core book or Matrix related expansion altering the
fundamentals of how it works, why things happen, and what characters do to
interact with it. A 5th edition will have new and wholly incompatible rules for how
the Matrix works, if only because every single core book has done so in the past.
Even the SR4 Anniversary edition has a basically completely different set of Matrix
Rules from either the mess presented in Unwired or the original SR4. And yeah, it's
still a mess.

But most of the rules that would like to be changed are pretty minor tweaks.

Skills cost too much relative to attributes. Solution: reduce skill costs, either reduce
payer build points to compensate or don't.

Body, Strength, Charisma, and Willpower are weak stats. Solution: Merge Body and
Strength, Merge Charisma and Willpower. SR4 recognized that the old six stat
system was broken because Quickness and Intelligence were so much better than the
other 4, and split them. But that isn't far enough, because it wasn't just that the
powerful two were too good - the other four weren't good enough.

There are too many Combat Skills, severely punishing players who want to use a lot
of different weapons. Solution: Combine a bunch of Combat Skills. The marginal
benefit you receive for learning longarms or automatics when you already have the
other is in no way commensurate with the cost - so we should just go back to having
a Firearms skill. It really is OK if almost everyone takes it. Street Samurai will still
have smartlinks and muscle toner.

Spirits are too powerful. Writing the Spirit section for Street Magic was very hard,
because Spirits in the core book are just too good across the board. Solutions: They
need to have their skills cut in half. Also their Mental stats and Edge need to be
decoupled from Force. Unbound Spirits should have a Logic of about 2. Bound Spirits
can have a 3 or 4. Spirits should come into the world with an Edge of 1. Binding can
jolly well increase that. Have the deal where Allies get to use your Mental Stats really
come in handy.

The Hardened Armor rules are unsatisfying, and overly binary at the high end.
Solution: Hardened Armor vales should be reduced substantially, and turned into
automatic hits. That would make faster and smoother resolution and make AP
weaponry super effective against targets with hardened armor like it is supposed to
be in the fluff.

The move to quasi-objective wound boxes was a bad one. Solution: go back to LMSD
damage. I rather like the slickness of the POSIT wound system I wrote, but
regardless - if you have soak rolls there is no reason to not go to subjective wounds.
The double tap problem and the high end book keeping difficulties could be solved
in one go by having wounds increase in severity triangularly as damage remains
unsoaked.

And yeah, these are all fundamental changes. But they are not major changes. I
would prefer a longer combat round. I would like a pony. But the fact is that SR4 is
very playable and has an extremely good core system. If SR5 takes an objective stock
of how SR4 moved forward and what didn't work that well, it could be an extremely
god system that is almost entirely compatible with SR4 material. I really think that
we only even want a subtle evolution, like the change from SR2 to SR3.

-Frank