Edition preference Options

[Prime Mover]

So 5th edition is coming to a close. I have a group that’s been on hiatus for awhile. Some of them have been playing since first edition and as you can expect an edition change has started some interesting discussions. A side effect has been a lot of reminiscing about past games and editions. I’m curious about the community at large now that we’ve seen a completed 5th edition. If given opportunity to run/play a game if or until you touch a 6th edition would you prefer 4A or 5th? Not looking to start a war, I know all the arguments, just curious about preference.

[Koekepan]

I'd do 4A, if my group were non-crunchy style roleplayers, and pretend all the pages about technomancers don't exist.

If they liked extra crispy, I'd do 3E.

I'd stay far the hell away from 5E, because most of my players are professionals in the computing arena, and quite aside from all the other arguments, I wouldn't want to try justifying a wireless bonus.

[Thanee]

I would use 5E. Sure, it has some quirks and issues, but so does every other edition. 5E does more right than wrong in my view, there are a lot of good ideas in there (granted, some stuff is really strange, too), it just needs some polishing, and it's not too hard to change a few things (like some of the wireless bonuses, i.e. silencers), if necessary.

Bye
Thanee

[Moirdryd]

I really wanted to like 5e and liked bits of it. But therein was the problem, bits of it. As a collective it was firmly Okay. 3e does for me everything I always wanted for Shadowrun (after starting with 2e) I can use and drop things as I see fit but when I need or want nuts and bolts I have them.

[Iduno]

3rd seemed pretty decent from a balance standpoint, mostly. And great for fluff.

4th was nice from a (relative) simplicity standpoint, but the conversion assumed +X to TN and +X dice were in any way equivalent. A few things were hugely changed by that. Smartlink being very good instead of stupidly good is fine, willpower being unable to resist any spells at any normal level of play is not.

I'd like to see 4th rebalanced by someone competent, but the current hotness is to remove rules without regard to it improving the game at all. You'd have to wait for that terrible trend to end first. Alternatively, a somewhat simplified 3rd edition, with the same caveats.

Also, an edition with a good set of rules for the matrix: usable and interesting. It's an alternate future based on an alternate history, who cares what our computers can or can't do. Just give us rules that work, and put some effort into having them make sense for the world they're in (doesn't make the jobs of people who use the matrix on a daily basis for their work impossible).

[Mantis]

I'd say 4th ed. It gave us the most fun for the longest time. 1st through 3rd were fun in their time but it was mostly gonzo fun and as we've gotten older our play stay has naturally changed. We prefer the more trench coat and mirror shades style of play these days. For us, 5th ed's biggest failing was that it just wasn't fun. Its supposed to be a game and games are supposed to be fun.
I'm likely going to skip 6th ed completely. We've been playing a lot of 5th ed D&D and that has been way more fun that I thought it would be. Seems to hit all the right marks for a game and actually brings back a lot of that nostalgic feeling from playing when I was a kid.

[Prime Mover]

What got all this started was rearranging my shelves and opening up 4th edition anniversary book. Spent rest of night doing a reread. The polish compared to 5th is jarring. Run every edition and made it work but going back over anniversary book got wondering if would be worth it to run for few months. I know there are still pockets of players using older editions. Curious how jarring it is using them in current setting fluff, and how players who've had experience with later editions deal with backtracking. Trying to avoid making it to confusing and bogging table down.

[Prime Mover]

I'd say 4th ed. It gave us the most fun for the longest time. 1st through 3rd were fun in their time but it was mostly gonzo fun and as we've gotten older our play stay has naturally changed. We prefer the more trench coat and mirror shades style of play these days. For us, 5th ed's biggest failing was that it just wasn't fun. Its supposed to be a game and games are supposed to be fun.
I'm likely going to skip 6th ed completely. We've been playing a lot of 5th ed D&D and that has been way more fun that I thought it would be. Seems to hit all the right marks for a game and actually brings back a lot of that nostalgic feeling from playing when I was a kid.

Done same here, back to D&D for awhile and had a lot of fun with it. Can never escape my SR addiction though and getting the itch to dive back into the shadows. On fence about 6th edition too. I’m all for streamlining and abstracting or creating some universal mechanics. What it looks like though is a streamline of systems and a complete overhaul of combat. Won’t judge till can see it really pushed at a table but it’s a serious change that could really change the “feel” of the setting. It’s giving me same kinda trepidation D&D 4th edition did and that flopped at my table. Fingers crossed.

[Stahlseele]

3rd was and remains the best.
I did play some 2nd and i did attempt 4th.
But no. 3rd or bust!

[Thanee]

I vastly prefer the newer systems (4th+), because they finally managed to do what they were meant to do from the beginning. That is, generate a number of successes and not just one (or very few) high number(s). The TN system has always been wonky in the older editions. The huge lowering of probabilities getting up to TN 6 and then a sudden flattening of the curve (TN 7 being the same, TN 8 mostly the same, and so on). The idea has always been to count the number of hits or successes and determine how well a task went from there. But that was barely possible when your TNs would routinely approach 6+ or even 10+ or more with modifiers.

I vastly prefer the fixed TN of 4th edition (and those coming after). In fact, we played with a very similar system (extensively house ruled) back in the day with the 2nd edition, already. TN was 4 for pretty much everything, only extremely few modifiers (like being seriously wounded or attempting something crazy difficult) would change that up to 5 or in super-extreme circumstances even 6. Mostly everything else was changed into dice pool modifiers, pretty much like 4th edition did it, but with the acknowledgement, that +2 dice equals +1 hit of TN 4, +3 dice +1 hit of TN 5, and so on. Smartlink, for example, was +4 dice.

Bye
Thanee

[Glyph]

4th Edition overall for me, even though it had its problems. SR3 was good too, though. SR5 had a few good ideas and well-written spots, but had serious, serious problems. The nerfs made the game less fun - hackable cyberware, overwatch scores, double-digit background counts (and even lower background counts could ruin adepts), and of course Limits. There was an unacceptable level of errors and inconsistencies. And finally there was the fluff, which was even worse than the crunch. The smug douchebro tone, the levels of ignorance shown, and the haphazard mixing of fluff and crunch. It had the potential to be an improved version of SR4, but it was a massive editorial fail at the production level.

[Wounded Ronin]

3rd was and remains the best.
I did play some 2nd and i did attempt 4th.
But no. 3rd or bust!

Yeah I quit after they stopped supporting 3rd edition.

I was frustrated by how 4th edition was basically World of Darkness.

3rd edition at the time felt realistic and flexible compared to D20, which was its major competitor at the time. In 3rd editions guns could kill you in a few shots, but in D20 you had hitpoints. In 3rd edition you didn't need to be a level 20 electronics whiz to hack the electronics panel; you just needed to distribute your points and you could start with a decent character but at the same time you didn't eventually become all-powerful like you did in the D20 platform.

3rd edition probably remains one of the better rulesets for firearms combat, if you don't want to get as crunchy and clunky as Phoenix Command, which was designed to be the holy grail rule system for realistic firearms combat. That is to say it's not overly complex, but it feels realistic enough and you can still easily get a TPK from a volley of incoming fire.

So the system was great and the fan community was really breaking down the statistics, finding statistical inconsistencies in the rules, and working on a big project to patch everything up. There was tons of great house rules and information on firearms, like Raygun's firearms rules.


And then the IP holders decided, for no reason that I can understand to this day, to flush all that (including the dedicated body of fans) down the toilet, and make SR into World of Darkness. And also give everyone a smartphone in what had previously been known as a retro 80s cyberpunk game.

Having been flushed down the toilet back on that fateful day, I have no interest in trying any of the newer editions. Why wouldn't they just go back to 3rd edition and continue to refine it? I really felt like perfection had been just around the corner so it's hard to describe how disappointed I felt when SR as I knew it was essentially discarded instead.

[Wounded Ronin]

Also, I'd say that for fluff, personally, instead of trying to take everything out of the 80s, I would have doubled down on the 80s. Done more research into the culture and economics of the time, and then made references to that through the fluff.

[farothel]

I'll take 4th edition. Mostly because that's the one I started with and that's the one I have the most books of.

[SpellBinder]

I'll take 4th edition. Mostly because that's the one I started with and that's the one I have the most books of.

Same here, for the most part. My overall introduction to Shadowrun was 2nd or 3rd edition, but in part a lack of support from the few GMs and other players made it difficult with the mechanics of the time. Sure SR4 was a rip of WOD, and also had a mess of its own issues, but honestly it was the one where I was really able to dive into the crunch and lore and actually get it.

[Moirdryd]

The real irony is that you could have kept the 80s feel and done things like smartphones, wireless matrix, AR and so on. Heck it was already there in the Matrix sourcebook in many ways. A little more focus on how people actually used the Matrix as a day to day tool and the contrast in what Deckers do and it was there. 3e with a few tweaks would be IMHO the best thing.

[Arkeus]

My favorite edition is 3rd. I started playing in 4th edition, then started GMing in 4th Anniversary edition, and moved to 5th when it came out. After having a lot of issues with character growth, prices of gear, balancing issues between the sam and mages, I started looking into previous editions and landed on 3rd. It feels more like the video games and definitely the Neo-80's cyberpunk that me and my players are so fond of. 4th+ does have some nice things, a standard target number and such, but +/- Dice is just as easy to figure out as +/- TN. Also, everyone knows exactly how many dice they're rolling at all times. The book construction of 3rd feels more congruent (Don't know if that's quite the right word, but eh...), with the exception of no bikes in the main book yet half of the sample characters have bikes listed as pilot skills but that's another thing...

[Blade]

I've started with 2e and its art and style still holds a special place in my heart.
I've returned to it with 3rd ed, and it was the first time I actually followed the rules as written. The universe got a bit more fleshed out but that felt like it was at the expense of the wackiness of 2nd ed. But that was also probably the mood of the time.

I had many problems with the rules of 3rd ed so when 4th came out and fixed many of them I was quite happy. I quite enjoyed 4th fluff-wise as well, it returned a bit to the streets as opposed to the "high profile international mercenaries" feel that 3rd ed was starting to get.

But the more I played the more I felt like the rules didn't really fit my style. So I started adding houserules and finally came up with a whole system. That was during the time SR5 came out, and I saw nothing in 5 that addressed any of the problems I had so I stayed on my house rules. I'm not particularly looking forward to SR6. I have a ruleset that completely support the kind of stories I want to have and I see no reason to switch.

[Kyoto Kid]

...started with 1E. Yep with the two tiered damage codes and skill web that if you rolled really good, you could take down a building with a recipe for blancmange.

3E is still probably my favourite to this day. I liked that knowledge skills had more of an effect (the supplementary skill rule) and B&R skills were more useful. I also liked being able to design and build custom decks (I actually wrote up a spreadsheet where you just entered the costs of the various components, results of your rolls and the time intervals and calculated the final cost). The variable TN made Smartlinks more useful and allowed one to do the incredible if you rolled really well. I feel 3E also built an incredible world, though I was sort of dismayed that the Native American influence (which I loved in 1E and 2E) was somewhat downplayed.

What initially turned me off from 4E were the hard skill caps (you no longer could be the "best you could be" but only as good as everyone else) and the introduction of what essentially was a "luck" attribute (Edge). I felt the individual archtypes were watered down and character advancement was limited as for a mundane, once you hit the caps on your primary skills, what was there to spend Karma on? Edge made it seem to me like I was playing a P&P MMORPG or video game as in effect characters had "extra lives." In previous editions you had one and only one chance for a "Hand of God" to save your hoop and you often ended up paying dearly for it. Now it came down to "I burn a point of Edge (which I can get back with Karma)" to keep from having to build a new character.

Magic became way too powerful while Adepts were hosed in that they had to pay Karma for both initiating and increasing their Magic attribute to get an additional power point hence they fell further behind the chromed up Sammy (there was an alternate rule introduced later that allowed an Adept to purchase a power point at 20 Karma but many powers were still capped by the character's Magic Attribute).

I felt Technomancers were just poorly thought out (in both 4E and 5E) as instead of being the outgrowth of the Otaku from 3E, they became just another flavour of "awakened" character. Otaku in 3E were required, and encouraged, to get implants, with no penalty to their resonance (some implants that directly augmented their matrix abilities cost half the normal Essence). Spell slingers had spells that mimicked a number of augmentations which TMs didn't have at their disposal. The only way to get a little more speed and resilience in the Meat World was to sacrifice resonance to get bio/cyber/gene augmentations.

I also was not fond of the reduction in starting resources as most augmentations, particularly bioware, remained very expensive, if not more so in some cases.

Another feature I didn't like was everything depending on a wireless connection. I could understand that for a host or even a vehicle, but chrome? Why would you ever want something so important like your augmentations to be so vulnerable? This not only further nerfed some implants (like smartlinks and cyber senses) as the bonuses you would normally have received in previous editions only applied if wireless was on making you a target for Deckers and TMs. Prior to this a Decker would have to physically jack into your character to control your 'ware which would have been pretty obvious. Yeah we have the IoT today, which I see as more of a curse than a blessing.

About the only features of 4E I liked was the build point system (similar to what the SR Companion books in 2E and 3E presented) and the fact that they got rid of that ridiculous magic loss rule for wounds (as the wound severity table was replaced by a numeric value system). I house ruled that out for adepts in 3E as it was a total crock for them. Spell slingers had other ways to compensate like foci, fetishes, spirits/elementals, and spells, but if an Adept lost MA, he/she lost abilities which I felt was too big a penalty for someone who more often than not is going to be in the midst of combat.

5E did away with some of those rules that I didn't like in 4E but didn't go far enough.

One of my Primary criticisms is that it went back to the old Priority system which I was glad to get away from. It also inflated the priority cost of metatypes to the point I usually played humans. (loved playing Dwarves in 3E). The Karma Build was a poor replacement for the old point build system, though Sum to Ten did have a few merits. Starting Resources however were still an issue while costs for bio and geneware were not modified to compensate. I also wasn't very fond of "limits", particularly attribute based ones. If for example, you didn't have a high Body and Strength, you couldn't be very sneaky (which is more a function of Agility than body or strength and actually, being smaller and lighter is an advantage) as your hits were capped at a low level (unless you pre-edged the test to exceed the limit).

While I was glad to see a return to cyberdecks (never could buy hacking a highly secure host with what was essentially a souped up smartphone), however their high cost for even a halfway decent one meant you pretty much had to take resources at "A" and even then it took about half or more of your starting funds. Also gone was the the ability to customise your deck like 3E allowed (there were no new customisation rules in Data Trails [the "basic" Matrix book]). The "custom"deck system that was introduced in Kill Code paled in comparison to what what could be done in 3E and such decks were highly inflexible (you couldn't swap deck attributes as you could with a standard "off the shelf" deck). This kind of contradicted the old Decker proverb that you should never put trust in someone else's tech.

I also didn't like the way archery was dealt with. as it often would be far more expensive due to having to match the bow and arrow ratings than just getting a big gun with Explosive rounds or APDS that could was capable of semi or full automatic fire. If your character used combat drugs that aucmented strength, you had to have multiple sets of different rated arrows (and multiple bows if you didn't have the Dynamic Tension Bow from Hard Targets).

Riggers on the other hand seemed to get a bit more love in 5E, with more cool toys and more options for drones (like swarming) as well as more reasonably priced VCR rigs and RC decks.

Having done missions play in 5E over the last couple years, I got used to it's oddities (Missions has it's own "house rules" that mostly deal what with metatypes and qualities are allowed) and overall I still liked it better than it's predecessor. However, I still find myself slipping into "3E mode" occasionally.

From what I have seen of 6E in podcasts and live play presentation I am sold on it so far as it seems to be influenced by the Anarchy rules which already is a more "simplified" version of the game. I'm all for fixing broken rules, inconsistencies, and stuff that just doesn't make sense, but a full change of the entire mechanics (again) like we had after 3E, to me seems a like a bit of overkill.

It is hard to say if I will just stay with 5E house ruling out the silly stuff I don't agree with as I did before. or possibly go back to 3E (I still have all the books). There was a lot of nice intrigue and hooks back then, most of which were pretty much hand waved or clumsily dealt with in System Failure.

[binarywraith]

3rd was and remains the best.
I did play some 2nd and i did attempt 4th.
But no. 3rd or bust!

Agreed. I still run SR3 set in the late 2050's as my primary jam. I first played 1E, first GM'd 2e, and 3 is my bread and butter. The Matrix rules are still tetchy, and I play fast and lose with modifiers to keep combat cinematic, but it works.

If you have to pick between 4A and 5e, go 4A. It got errata.

[Lionesque]

If you have to pick between 4A and 5e, go 4A. It got errata.

This. The OP asked for advice regarding 4th or 5th, and IMHO, there is just no comparison; Of the two, 4th is MUCH more fun to play.

[Arkeus]

This. The OP asked for advice regarding 4th or 5th, and IMHO, there is just no comparison; Of the two, 4th is MUCH more fun to play.

Oh man, you are right. I glanced over the which is better... Having played 4E, 4A and 5E, I'd probably say 4A was better. I just stuck with GMing 5E for so long because I had more of the PDFs for it than I did of 4A. I think they tried to do too many things with 5E and at first I thought they helped cap my crazier players, but as we got to fighting tougher opponents like Red Samurai (The players were at that level), it got so hard to do any damage on either side, that combats came to a halt basically. Limits initially looked to be good, but I don't think they actually were.

[Arkeus]

Edit: BAH duplicate post.

[hermit]

Pretty much what Kyoto Kid says. That said, I'm playing 4E anyway, have been for a long time now, as a compromise between new players being put off by SR3's complexity, and the core rules skeleton being far more smooth and less probne to absurdities SR1 thru 3 were, like TN 6 and 7 being exactly the same probability (because you can't roll 0 on a d6).

SR4A fixed enough of my initial gripes with SR4 to be ... acceptable. We've houseruled Technomancers so that most of the worst bullshit Moritz Lohmann implemented to boost his fucking Kendermancer is cut back (no Infinithreading, massively toned down Widgets and Sprite intelligence, no Resonance Plane of Perpetual Backups, rules for hacking living personas), and Skinlink is a required and very useful tool for everyone remotely security conscious. Combat decking isn't viable in SR4 anyway, and I never understood the fun in denying player agency that way without offering a viable defense anyway (and no, Devon, if anyone is retarded, you are).

SR5 ... well, our resident computer scientist took a look at the Matrix rules, and within minutes she was laughing in disbelief and said she could not take this shit seriously.

All in all, SR5 had a load of good to great idas, and managed to ruin almost all of them with a combination of arrogance, inability to do basic math, and extremely low work quality (mostly due to nonexistent editing). It also included downright bizarre design decisions (like the exploding/burning/fuming bricked brainware), which were fixed by way of the worst possible "clarifications" ("It explodes, but that does no damage, so all's well!") and there never seemed to be a guideline, let alone a plan, to either metaplot or rules (see the Matrix for the most drastic example - Kill Code tied that up as good as possible, but "as good as possible" sometimes just isn't the same as "good").

As for 6E, I have little hope this will fare better. The Edge system looks like it has been baby-proofed into meaninglessness, Armor now means nothing, and the only viable characters in combat are trolls and orks, but the decker now finally ios totally forced to go with the party, because game developers never leave their dungeons in more than one way.

tl;dr: 4th is way better than 5th, and 4A trumps 4th easily, so go 4A. Take what equipment, magic and other stuff you want from 5th and downconvert, it's perfectly possible and some of the early PDFs have dual rules so you can distill guidelines for how to convert out of them.

Riggers on the other hand seemed to get a bit more love in 5E, with more cool toys and more options for drones (like swarming) as well as more reasonably priced VCR rigs and RC decks.

Unfortunatly, like with everything, they ruined this by making riggers fully defenseless against hackers. Seriously. Rigger 5's entire advice to riggers in that regard was "suck it up", and that is a quote (and the less is said about the ludicrous rigger vs decker example in the core book, the better).