Now you've got me considering reaching for my copies to see what each edition (hardcopy of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, softcopy of 5th (which I've not actually looked at in that much detail)) says about Essence! Drat!
(Don't forget that, in the earlier versions, low Essence also made healing more difficult - especially the magical healing so many teams relied on! I always thought that an Essence of 0 meant death, but I might have just glossed that!)
Oh well, I did it, at least for 3e (because it's in the bookcase behind me, so I didn't need to get up) ...
Essence cannot be lowered to 0 or less, though it may be less than 1. An Essence of 0 means you're dead, and no one can play a dead character.
(SR3, p56)
As for the infamous cascading splatbook syndrome, there's no way to produce a core rules that includes all of the optional extras, unless you want it to be a couple of feet thick. Or more, thinking about my bookcase upstairs.
However, the corebook would be correct in stating "All you need to play". It does have everything you need to play the game - at least at the basic level. You've got the most common races, the basics of magic, the most common chrome, the most common weapons, etc. So with just the core, you can play in the SR world. Not everyone wants playable Drakes, or playable Infected, or all of the extra 'ware, or the complex ritual spell stuff, or the detailed vehicle customisation rules. So it leaves it open to the playing group to pick and choose the extras that they want, or don't want. Those people who do want it (or have an unfortunate sourcebook addiction, like me), end up buying the additional books. But you don't have to, to play something that's still SR.
If everything for an edition of SR was to be included in the one book, then it would be too heavy to ship, and too expensive for people to buy. And this is a business - if people can't afford the product, the company can't sell the product. (We'll ignore, for now, the fact that, if your product gets a reputation for missing key details, you also can't sell your product.)
And they could have combined their several magic sourcebooks into one, but then it would be several times the size, and several times the cost, which makes it harder to sell as an incremental purchase.
Which is also another reason for the additional sourcebooks coming out ... if the one book is all they ever need, then there's nothing more that you can sell them ...
However, I very much agree about the errata - it seems that these days, more companies are treating the initial release as a beta version, and waiting for the purchasers to spot the errors. If I buy a rulebook, I want to be able to use it then, not wait a year for all of the errors to be spotted and then have to try to find and download an errata sheet (or volume).
(I'm referring to actual errors here, not amendments to the system mechanics - those should have been tested and worked out in advance, and any major change to the system really demands a new edition, IMHO - and should therefore be something that is a last resort - although I still remember the apology in the back of SR2 when that came out pretty soon after SR1.)
In summary - I don't have an issue with sourcebook libraries, but that might just be a generational thing, but I do have an issue with shoddy products full of errors.
